Welcome to the third of 22 installments to a series I've dubbed 'Evaluating Cannes' Competition', where I will be going through and reviewing each of the 22 films that played in competition for the right to win the Palme d'Or at this year's, 2026, Cannes Film Festival.
And maybe, by the start of next Cannes, I will have my own Palme d'Or winner selected ... today's review is centered around that film which was awarded the Palme by the Park Chan-wook-led jury: 'Fjord'. The honor was Cristian Mungiu's second Palme, the first coming in 2007 for '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days', a late-stage Ceausescu-era period piece about two university students on the hunt for a black market abortion. Cannes juries have proven to have an affinity for Mungiu's style, as he earned a Best Screenplay nod in 2012 ('Beyond the Hills'), was a jury member in 2013, and earned Co-Best Director honors in 2016 ('Graduation') alongside Olivier Assayas.
While Mungiu's latest film 'R.M.N.' left the 2022 festival empty handed, the film serves as a helpful road map to 'Fjord', as several themes and motifs overlap, but 'Fjord' feels like a more focused offering from the director. As opposed to spreading his focus across society at large, spreading his message thinner across characters standing in for the circumstances around them, Mungiu seems here to be working the other way around, using the central family of 'Fjord' to reflect the society around them.
In the simplest terms, 'Fjord' is a European 'drama of manners'. When Mia and Lisbet, matriarchs of their families, meet for the first time, Mia laments their teenage daughters being at a "difficult age". This phrase is a double entendre for Mungiu in the context of the film, as for the traditionalist central family, it is a "difficult age" to rear a family for a couple with their beliefs in Norway versus in Romania. When the Gheorghius come to Norway, they are confronted with the differences that exist in Europe.
Even the union of the Romanian Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Norwegian Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) is unity through a spiritual lens. The hallmark of their family is the degree to which they hold conservative beliefs through their faith, startling their secular neighbors. What Mungiu shows, particularly through the neighboring Halberg family -- Noora, a girl the age of the Gheorghius' eldest daughter, Mats, the school headmaster, and Mia, a lawyer sympathetic to the new family -- is that just because one says something doesn't exist does not mean it doesn't exist. This goes for the over-arching religiosity of the Gheorghius' family, too, take Emmanuel's (eldest son) subconscious taking-in of his father's morals, but when we see Noora slice her own arm, or Mats snap at her in a much more harsh way that we will see Mihai overtly with our eyes in this film, Mungiu prompts us to question how things look on the outside versus what they appear to be.
Mungiu plays with perception in ways that make it clear that this is one of his nodes of interest. How the new neighbors perceive Mihai and Lisbet is important, but equally so is the viewer's conscious understanding of the family through the pictures on the screen. Mungiu does this from the first scene of the film, when he presents Mihai as a harsh paternal presence, and then rather literally divides the children of the family from their parents, foreshadowing, but in the moment a forced reconciliation for Elia, and off to school go the children. Mungiu never presents any actual physical abuse on the screen, but he does seem specific on what he picks and chooses to be shared with the viewer. The recounting of discussions of the Gheorghius children as to whether or not their mother hit them are a game of telephone: we see this actual action, we hear the discussion of the children outside the bus, and then we are in the courtroom as it get misappropriated. In this way, there is an 'Anatomy of a Fall' quality about 'Fjord'; the viewer is given the freedom to evaluate the characters and the situation for themselves without necessarily filling in every detail.
Perception is critical in the viewing of this film, literally. As in 'R.M.N.', beautiful mountains and spectacular panoramic exterior wide shots are a treat for the viewer. One particular shot of Lisbet taking Ake (Mia's father, an infirm man in a wheelchair) on a walk is particularly ravishing, featuring a long, extended, walk-and-talk with the humans of the frame looking rather inconsequential compared to the mountainous backdrop. The interiors are much same as one finds 'R.M.N.', too; tight shots that are designed to heighten drama through compression of bodies into the frame. The juxtaposition against the exteriors is not lost, especially in act three. As tension ramps up scenes like the Romanian cavalry arriving in their car to aid Mihai's media blitz, Mihai and Lisbet in a holding room waiting to visit their kids, or the courtroom scenes are tersely framed and feel claustrophobic.
Movement is also critical in these scenes. The poster-child example of its importance occurs during the testimony of Mihai, another tightly-packed frame, with Lisbet on the edge of the frame (bottom left). During the testimony, the camera floats in-between centering Mihai and the cross-examining counsel, but for the end of the scene, the shot returns exactly where it began, with Lisbet just barely in the picture. While we are near-always handheld (there are some virtually-imperceptible movements in some of these exteriors) there are a few instances where we go into a dramatic, shaky, handheld shot, like when Ake goes missing. Mungiu's framing of exteriors and deliberate composition of interiors mean that these shaky shots are infrequent and, by virtue, more meaningful (and jarring) when they occur.
Mungiu plays with social optics, but, perhaps contrary to some of the more polarized opinions coming out of its premiere at Cannes, he is not here to support his socially conservative family. At the end of 'R.M.N.', Matthias, the protagonist and someone balancing on a knife's edge of the culture war, is left outside with a hoard of bears, versus being welcomed inside by his cultured lover with a job offer elsewhere in the EU. Mungiu presents us his characters and then sees them to their natural next phase. The logic of his characters is sound and true to their selves, and this is what creates the film's tension.
The family of 'Fjord' are far less out in the cold than Matthias. Mihai was able to call upon the force of the government to aid him. We are even told a petition received 80,000 signatures in the United States to return their children to them. To this point, the "culture war", as presented in the film, is literally invented, a fabrication of Mihai's and the Romanian political actors' doing to take advantage of the social climate. Yes, Mungiu "invents" it through the suspicious actions of the native Norwegians as the auteur, but it is Mihai who decides to take matters into his own hands by veering into this alt-right pathway, aided and supported, we are told, by the ambassador. Again echoing the themes of 'R.M.N.', it is the story of a society divided with a wedge by general mistrust.
One of the more interesting intersections of character progression and social themes comes with the two daughters. Much like the abuse central to the film's narrative, we never actually see any events that seem openly queer between Elia and Noora, but the way it comes up with repetition in the film, and Mungiu keeping Noora in the backdrop of the film, never too far out of frame, that almost legitimizes it. Mihai looming in the background at least twice in scenes of the girls hugging a goodbye prompts him to state that the girls are together "a bit too much". His behavior, like Noora's own rebellion against her parents, helps also helps to legitimize the understanding of these events in the context of the story, albeit from a more negative point of view. This speaks to those ideas Mungiu highlights of perception, and when Mungiu reveals the final scene to the viewer, it's interesting that the messages appears to be what appears to be true can, at times, truly be the case.
Final Rating: 4/5
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No footage in the video embedded into this blog post is my own, nor is the embedded YouTube video itself my own, and I claim no ownership or credit over it. All rights reserved to Cristian Mungiu (intellectual property), Neon (distribution and trailer ownership rights), and the copyright holders of 'Sheep in the Box': © 2026 Mobra Films, Why Not Productions, Eye Eye Pictures, Film I Vast, Filmgate Films, Garagefilm International, Snowglobe, AAMU Film Company, France 3 Cinema. This non-commercial blog plot is intended for critical and educational purposes and my usage of any material I do not own or have the license or rights to should be considered 'Fair Use' under Section 107 of the United States Copyright Act.
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